Fishless in Spooner
Thursday, July 25, 2024 4:04 PM
Forgot one thing from yesterday, we stopped at the Grand Portage Casino after we crossed back into the US to exchange our Canadian money. They gave each of us $5 in free play money, Brian promptly lost his and ‘Old Lucky’ turned her’s into $15 in a few minutes.
We had our first fire last night, been too tired most nights to stay up until 10:30 for the sun to go down.
Today wasn’t going to be too exciting, mostly just driving south on the way home. We did decide to stop at the Governor Tommy G. Thompson Fish Hatchery as we’ve visited other hatcheries and they’ve been very interesting.
We arrived at the hatchery in Spooner and found that there were no fish being raised except in ponds far from the visitor center and they aren’t accessible to tourists. They did have a nice display explaining what goes on at the hatchery, and it is an impressive setup. They have 46 rearing ponds, and may produce 200,000 to 2.5 million small walleye, 100,000 to 350,000 larger walleye, 35,000 to 60,000 large musky, and an average of 21 million white sucker fry in a typical year. However all we got to see were a bunch of empty tanks in a dark room. 😢 Maybe it should be called the FishLESS Hatchery.
We had a nice lunch in the parking lot listening to the waterfall on the Yellow River, but then it was back to driving and getting setup in our last campground for this trip.